Captain Jack Sparrow is back messing around with the supernatural, this time it's the Legendary Davy Jones and his ghostly ship, The Flying Dutchman. Jack owes Davy a debt, and had better pay up or face eternal damnation. When Jack wrecks the wedding of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, he drags them into his hellish debacle.

Hollywood has learned absolutely nothing from The Matrix, and so Disney is filming Pirates of the Caribbean sequels 2 and 3 back to back. I guess the hope here is that it’ll turn out more like the second and third Back to the Futures rather than winding up with a third movie turd like Matrix Revolutions. It’ll no doubt help if the third movie is actually about Will Turner and Captain Jack Sparrow instead of getting lost exploring new ancillary characters we don’t really care about like Bootstrap Bill Turner. Unless there’s a dock fight where Bootstrap Bill has to fight off hordes of invading um… zombies by himself while we ignore Jack and Will for thirty minutes, the third movie should at least be better than Revolutions.

But let’s not set our sights so low. The first Pirates film was a rollicking fun adventure that works almost entirely because Johnny Depp is flat out awesome. Without him, the plot is flaccid and silly, and the best thing the film has going for it is a truly fantastic musical score which should have won an Oscar. That means there’s plenty of room for improvement in the subsequent sequels, and as long as Depp is on board (which he is), they’ve got a great framework to use as a jumping off point.

As for Captain Jack Sparrow, he’s an instantly iconic character like The Terminator, Han Solo, or Indiana Jones. Characters like that never wear out their welcome, and tend to shine even in the crappiest of films. What that means is that as long as Depp is on his game, it’s almost impossible for Dead Man’s Chest to fail.